Oh, re: the app starting slowly – I think there might be a bug in the current Max distribution that causes standalones not to respect the status of the usesearchpath attribute for the standalone object; this makes your app search all app subfolders in your Applications folder for files. You can verify this by looking at the Max window in your application – if you have another Max-based application in your Applications folder, your app will likely see a conflict with several files from the other Max app.